Over the past two decades, the promise of accelerated drug development and personalized medicine have brought heighten attention to the field of biomarker. But do you really know what biomarker are, how they are developed, and how they are used?
Here, I'll share over 15 years of experience in the fields of biomarker development and translational research to try to answer some of these questions.

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Thursday, October 13, 2011

Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy to Monitor Tumor Metabolism: Not a Biomarker Yet But a Promising Concept

In the
October 12th issue of PLos One, Alessia Lodi and Sabrina Ronen from
UCSF published the results of their work on the use of Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy
(MRS)
to monitor the metabolic activity of tumor cells (link). Although this work was entirely conducted in
vitro on cell lines, the concept presented in this paper offer a glimpse at a possible
new approach to monitor drug effect early during treatment. Indeed, there is ample evidence that anti-cancer
drugs alter the metabolic profile of cancer cells before producing detectable
effects on tumor size (detectable by CT scan or MRI) or even
overall metabolic activity (detectable by FDG-PET).

The
utility of MRS to monitor early metabolic changes induced by drugs in cancer
cells has been demonstrated before.
However, these earlier studies focused on single metabolites which
limited their observations to the specific drug – cell combination studied. In this work, the authors expanded on earlier work
MRS use for the monitoring of cancer cell metabolism by used an unbiased 1H
MRS-based metabolomics approach to investigate the overall metabolic
consequences of treatment with the phosphoinositide 3-kinase inhibitor LY294002 and the heat shock
protein 90 inhibitor 17AAG in
prostate and breast cancer cell lines.

Obviously,
translating this concept to human patients, in which complexity will be several
orders of magnitude greater, will not be easy but one can speculate that as MRS
technology further progresses, tracking multiple metabolites in vivo will
become trivial.